Saturday, December 20, 2008

The Penningtons were the first family I created in this neighborhood, and for a long time, they were the only family in it. I started the family up along the lines of the Starving Artist challenge, where you start with an Adult and a Teen, then promptly kill the Adult off after you move them in, leaving the Teen to manage on their own. While I never really intended to follow the rules of the challenge too closely, I am using a few of the core rules to it, with one or two of my own twists, namely:

No one may ever be moved in from outside. To join this house you must be born into it.

No one living in the house may hold a job outside the house. All money must be earned via other means such as painting, novels, selling produce from the garden, etc. No valid means of making money from within the home is prohibited except for they cannot open a home business.

The "heir" must always be an heiress, preferably the first born daughter. The current heiress/head of the household must keep having children until she gets a daughter. If the first child born is a daughter, any additional children are optional.

Every blood member of the family must become a witch/warlock. This includes spares and their descendants that move to other lots. Alignment will be determined based on Nice points: 1-3 Nice points = Evil, 4-6 Nice points = Neutral, 7-10 Nice points = Good. Spouses (of the family members living outside the main house) may optionally become witches/warlocks as well and will follow the same rules for alignment.

I think that covers the rules I've established for this house for the most part, so on to telling you about the family.

The family started in Challengeville when Alfred Pennington and his daughter Arlina moved into the first house built there. Sadly, no sooner had the cab dropped them off and pulled away, then a swarm of boolprop flies descended upon Alfred and reduced him to dust. Arlina mourned her father for a time, but then picked herself up and got on with her life. There was enough money in the bank for her to live comfortably, if not extravagantly, and she gradually began to add to it with money earned from selling paintings. Her teen years passed in something of a blur of studying, painting, and socializing. Indeed, she was quite the social butterfly during this time despite being a Knowledge sim, and not a Popularity sim. Of the many people she met on her forays to the few community lots in town, two of them were the good and evil witches, whose names I can't remember offhand right now. She befriended them both, eventually becoming best friends then BFF with both until she was ready to make her decision about which she wanted to ask to make her a witch. Eventually, she decided to ask the good witch, who was happy to oblige her, and thus Arlina Pennington became Arlina Pennington the Good Witch. She wasn't quite Nice enough to sustain the goodness, however, and eventually her studies took her into the Neutral range of magicks. Here's a look at what she looks like currently:

But I've gotten a little bit ahead of the story I think. While Arlina did meet the witches as a teen, she was well into adulthood before she asked to be changed. Once she'd become an adult, she first set about finding a man, or men, to be the father(s) of her children. She thought that man might be Talin Depiesse, but when she invited him over with the intention of asking him for a date, he instead offered to set her up with a friend of his that he was sure she would get along with. Out of curiosity, she accepted his offer of a blind date with his friend. The friend was Jihoon Hsu, and it turned out that Arlina had 3 bolts of attraction for him! Needless to say, they hit it off famously right off the bat, though it was just a little bit creepy the way Talin lingered around in the living room watching them as they had their date and pawed all over each other. One thing led to another, and after Talin had finally said goodbye and left, they headed upstairs to the bedroom. Chimes were heard. And a few days later, Arlina gave birth to her first son, Brandon. Brandon is currently a teenager and only a day away from becoming an adult. I plan to send him to University.

Brandon has worked hard on his skills, helped greatly by the bug that makes skilling super fast once they've learned Physiology. It's helped him to get a number of scholarships for college, which is good since they don't have a lot of money.

While Arlina was crazy about Jihoon, she also knew that she couldn't marry him, so she tried to distract herself from him by getting friendly with other men. One of these other men was Troy Go, and when Brandon was still a toddler she got pregnant by Troy with her second son, Blake. Blake is currently about halfway through his teenage years. He will be going to college, but not for awhile yet. It was sometime during his toddlerhood I think that Arlina finally became a witch.

Blake has only just been made into a warlock by Arlina, thus he is still of Neutral alignment like her. He will be working his way up into Good alignment due to his 7 Nice points.

As her boys started growing up, Arlina devoted herself to them and to her magic studies. While she felt that two children were plenty for her, still she felt the need to produce an heiress, and so, lacking time to get to know any other men well enough now, she called up her old lover, and Brandon's father, Jihoon. An afternoon quickie, helped along with a bit of boolpropping, left her pregnant with her daughter Bethany. Bethany had just had her transition to teenhood the last I played their house, so all three of them are now teenagers.

I haven't yet had the chance to have Arlina turn Bethany into a witch. When she does, Bethany will work her way up to being Good given her 8 Nice points.

I know I haven't said much about what all happened while the kids grew up, but really there's not a whole lot to tell. Life for the Penningtons was fairly routine for the most part, especially once all of the kids were in school. The kids are the ones primarily responsible for keeping the money coming in with paintings that they sell (all are maxed in Creativity now), as Arlina rarely seems to have the time to paint. I had her spending any spare time she had working on her magic skills. And tending the garden. I also never really took any pictures of them along the way, but I started poking around in SimPE and found various snapshots of all of them. It's been my main source of portrait pictures so far. Most of them only had a current picture, but Bethany's file had a few of the earlier snapshot pics in it too. Here's a look at what she's looked like along the way:

Here are the kids' fathers:

Jihoon is Brandon and Bethany's father, Troy is Blake's father.

Here's a family tree I put together to show the relationships

And finally, here's a group shot of them from the lot information screen:

Sadly, I likely won't make it back to playing them for quite awhile now, except perhaps for playing Brandon at University. Stay tuned for any updates to their story.